Joanna Pettet, 1960s star who lit up Casino Royale and had flings with Terence Stamp and Alan Bates

Joanna Pettet, the actress, who has died aged 83, enjoyed a brief heyday as a leading lady in British and American films in the 1960s, memorably playing Mata Bond in the spy spoof Casino Royale.

Tall, blonde and doe-eyed, she bore a strong resemblance to Sharon Tate, who, as it happened, was one of her closest friends. Joanna Pettet was one of the last people to see Sharon Tate alive, lunching with her on the day she perished at the hands of the Manson Family.

Joanna Jane Salmon was born in Chelsea on November 16 1942, the daughter of Harold Salmon, an RAF pilot, and his wife Cecily, née Tremaine. When she was barely a year old, her father was killed in a flying accident while delivering a consignment of bananas.

Her mother soon remarried – Pettet was the surname of Joanna’s stepfather – and settled in Canada, where Joanna spent most of her childhood. At 16 she moved to New York and studied under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

In 1964 she made her Broadway debut in Jean Kerr’s comedy Poor Richard at the Helen Hayes Theatre, alongside Alan Bates and Gene Hackman; Time magazine hailed her as “an indelibly enticing ingénue”. She fell in love with Bates – “the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my life” – and they embarked on a romance, which continued intermittently after he had married another woman.

After a stint in the daytime soap opera The Doctors, Joanna Pettet made her film debut in Sidney Lumet’s The Group (1966), adapted from Mary McCarthy’s novel: The Sunday Telegraph’s critic singled her out among the ensemble cast for her “vivid portrait of developing neurotic frenzy” as Kay, the unhappy wife of a rebarbative playwright (Larry Hagman).

She returned to Britain for a time, to find herself at the heart of swinging London. “Anyone who was anyone was there, right in my flat, most nights. I’d look around and Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif would be there, having just popped in for a cup of tea.”

In 1967 she was cast as Mata Bond in Casino Royale, introduced with a spectacular belly-dancing number in a Buddhist temple that accounted for much of the film’s budget.

Playing the illegitimate daughter of the ageing Sir James Bond (David Niven) and Mata Hari, she was obliged to appear throughout in a diaphanous oriental-style costume, but took what opportunities the script gave her to display a flair for comedy. The episodic film also featured Woody Allen, Orson Welles and William Holden, but most of Joanna Pettet’s scenes were with British comedy stalwarts such as Bernard Cribbins, Derek Nimmo and Ronnie Corbett, over whom she loomed in a bedroom scene.

Her other film roles included Tom Courtenay’s love interest in the Nazi whodunnit The Night of the Generals (1967), the wife of Stanley Baker’s Great Train Robber in Peter Yates’s Robbery (1967), and George Sanders’s upright niece in the saucy farce The Best House in London (1969), written by Denis Norden. She publicised Blue (1968), a Western in which she starred with Terence Stamp, by posing nude for Playboy.

After a tumultuous relationship with the London Playboy Club supremo Victor Lownes, chronicled in detail in the press, she returned to the United States, and in 1968 married the American actor Alex Cord.

On August 8 1969 Joanna Pettet went to lunch at her friend Sharon Tate’s home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles; most of the meal was spent chatting about Sharon’s forthcoming baby, which was due in two weeks. That night, a group under the direction of Charles Manson entered the property and savagely murdered Sharon and four other people. “I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she recalled. “I had to be hospitalised and missed the funeral.”

She had already been worried about Sharon Tate because she found Sharon’s husband, Roman Polanski, malicious and controlling: “He ruled her entire life from the time she met him… I hated him.” Joanna Pettet would be played by Rumer Willis in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, alongside Margot Robbie as Sharon.

In the 1970s Joanna Pettet’s film career stalled, not helped by her role as the sister of Laurence Harvey’s cannibal in Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974), which went unreleased for some time owing to its gruesome content. She worked steadily in television into the 1980s, appearing in series such as Tales of the Unexpected, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Knots Landing and Murder, She Wrote. By the time she was 50, however, she had largely retired from acting.

In the 1970s her close friendship with the racing driver James Hunt had garnered much excited press coverage, but she insisted that she had remained faithful to Alex Cord. Nevertheless, their marriage was dissolved in 1989. She and Cord had a son, Damien, although in later life she took to social media to declare that Terence Stamp was Damien’s real father.

In 1995 Damien died of a heroin overdose, aged 26. Joanna Pettet moved to the Arizona desert and became a virtual recluse for a time; she drew strength, however, from her enduring friendship with Alan Bates, who had himself lost a son some years earlier.

In 2002 the widowed, increasingly infirm Bates told her that he wanted her to come and live with him in London. She did not hesitate: “It may sound desperate, but I really didn’t care. I’d spent my whole life loving him, and I just wanted to be with him.”

She accompanied Bates to Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood in March 2003; by then, however, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic c​ancer. Joanna Pettet not only cared for Bates, but turned a blind eye when he embarked on a fling with a young male fan while making his final film in France. After he died at the end of 2003, bequeathing her £95,000, she returned to live quietly in Arizona.

Joanna Pettet, born November 16 1942, died July 7 2026​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]